Pros:

Cons:

Last year's Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII met with some mixed reviews (mostly due to the disappointing, and in some cases downright racially insensitive, voiceovers). Still, it had a decent multiplayer game and some pretty graphical touches here and there. In Blazing Angels 2, a lot of the snags encountered in the first game have been smoothed out and the experience has been streamlined down to its essentials, while still adding a few new wrinkles to increase the variety of gameplay.

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe Redux

While the original Blazing Angels took a fairly rudimentary approach to presenting key moments of WWII's aerial conflict, Blazing Angels 2 spins wildly off into a tangential reality where a secret task force of Allied aces must battle the Axis' fiendish plot for world domination using a bizarre array of experimental technology. This storyline is reminiscent of the LucasArts PC classic Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe in that you eventually must capture a bunch of freaky German planes like the Flying Wing and rocket planes and use them against the malevolent Axis.

What brings this story to life much better than in the previous game is the comic-book style approach to the cut scenes. While to some they may seem kitschy or silly (even cheesy in the extreme), we found them to be extraordinarily entertaining due to their pulpy quality. They ape the classic cliffhanger films and comics of the WWII era (and the decades that followed immediately after the war) and provide immersiveness on a completely different level than we typically see in a simple shoot 'em-up flight game.

Quick Fix

Blazing Angels 2 handles significantly better than its predecessor, but not in the ways that you might expect. The first game provided a solid, if rather arcade-y, set of controls for maneuvering your planes and jets, but this new installment takes care of the issues that came with the wonky squad commands and bleary objectives. While the aircraft are just as easily managed as in the first game (perhaps even more so), just about everything else that you have to do is easier as well.

Target selection is significantly simpler and more intuitive, pressing A selects the next objective target (typically something you have to blow up) while holding the A button will select the closest objective. The B button functions the same way except that pressing it selects a threat (like an enemy jet fighter) while holding the button down will select the closest threat. This makes prioritizing your targets extremely simple.

Also, in the event that you have a target that needs to be protected (such as Red Square in Moscow), you can hold LB in order to lock your view on it and monitor its status. When you do this, a semi-transparent strip will appear across the upper-middle portion of the screen telling you exactly what your mission goals are. This is especially useful when compared to the previous game which sometimes made it hard to track your objectives.

Blazing Angels 2 is superior to the original game in every respect, but it's still not as amazing as the Xbox classic Crimson Skies. Still, for fans of the abandoned flight genre or of the original Blazing Angels, this game would be a fantastic addition to the library.